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23 July 2013

Sabah royal commission of inquiry is only flavor.... if findings ignored

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into illegal immigrants in Sabah will be another meaningless investigation if the government does not act on its findings

The 2013 electoral rolls is filled with many voters holding suspicious identity cards and a thorough investigation must be conducted into the authenticity of these documents.

This will be another meaningless RCI if these findings are ignored and the electoral rolls is not cleaned up.

This showed the Election Commission was not living up to its responsibility of safeguarding the public's confidence.

The applications for Malaysian identity cards were divided into three categories, P1, P2 and P3. The P1 and P2 categories were for applications which could not be processed over the counter. Applications which were not approved and cancelled fell into P3. The identity card numbers issued to the applicants on the temporary receipts were then revoked.

In January, National Registration Department (NRD) Identity Card Division head Ruslan Alias told the RCI that there were 130,549 problematic identity cards.

Ruslan said only 8,553 of the problematic identity cards had been probed, meaning there were still 105,297 which had yet to be investigated.

Based on a list of the 105,297 P1 and P2 identity card holders,it detected 49,159 of them were on the electoral rolls of the 2013 general election.

In the recently concluded May general election, 23,179 voters had old identity cards belonging to the P1 list and 25,980 voters were from the P2 list.

The five-man RCI panel led by former Sabah and Sarawak Chief Justice Tan Sri Steve Shim Lip Kiong found 4.9% of voters in Sabah held P1 and P2 old identity cards.

Eight out of 10 parliamentary seats with the highest number of P1 and P2 voters are located on the east coast of Sabah and 53.9% of such voters were registered between 1990 and 2000.

This was at the height of the Project IC or Project M activity. Before 1990, there was 20.3% P1 and P2 voters registered, and 12.8% between 2000 and 2010."

A more pertinent fact is that after 2010, 12.9% P1 and P2 voters were on the electoral rolls, it mean that the registration of voters with problematic identity cards was still going on.

These are all factors which the government should take into consideration before carrying out a delimitation exercise at the end of the year in Sabah, as flawed electoral rolls with so many dubious voters can't be used, he said.

We also called for Section 9(a) of the Elections Act 1958 to be abolished so that the electoral rolls can be challenged because of what has happened.

We were also puzzled that in cases where new identity card numbers were issued to voters along with new dates of birth, in some cases the gender of the individual had also been changed.

The issue of problematic identity cards had spilled over to other states in Malaysia, although the majority was in Sabah.

The RCI that a mechanism was needed within the NRD to prevent abuse, especially where discretionary identity cards were issued.

In this age of information technology, the superiors of issuing officers must monitor their actions, especially if a high number of discretionary identity cards have been issued by a small number of people.

comment

The RCI is actually a cinema(wayang) After the whole show is over, all participants go home and that's it What else do you expect?

PRU 13 is Sabah results must be null and void illegals have votered for UMNO and BN

The govt is on their way to buy another carpet where they are going to sweep all these episode (their episode) under it trying their utmost best to not let us realising it. See see see.

We have RCI on police, Lingam etc............and we have volume full of recommendations but it is just that - recommendations!

Of course nothing will be done!! When the recommendation by a committee headed by a former chief justice of the supreme court to implement the IPCMC can be ignored with impunity, what are the chances of the findings of this RCI even seeing the light of day?